Databricks Sparks Growth with $60M Series C
Databricks announced on December 15 that it has raised $60 million in Series C funding to help grow it commercial aspirations in support of the open-source Apache Spark project. To date, Databricks has raised a total of $107.5 million in funding since the company was first created in 2013.
The new funding round was led by New Enterprise Associates (NEA) and included the participation of Andreessen Horowitz. Databricks was founded by the developer team out of UC Berkeley AMPLab that first created Apache Spark.
Spark is widely used as a foundational element in Big Data analytics and processing stacks. The Apache Spark project today benefits from the contributions of over 1,000 developers from more than 250 different organizations.
“Apache Spark has enabled countless enterprises and cutting-edge early adopters to create business value through advanced analytics solutions,” Ali Ghodsi, CEO and Co-Founder at Databricks, said in a statement. “As Spark's adoption and the demand for our managed Spark platform continues to rise, this funding will advance our engineering and go-to-market strategies to address all of our customer's pain points as we continue to grow the Spark community.”
From a commercial support perspective, Databricks has a cloud-based data integration platform powered by Apache Spark. On November 30, Databricks announced new capabilities on its platform to help get organizations up and running rapidly with Spark in the cloud.
At the Spark Summit in June, Databricks announced the general availability of its Databricks Community Edition (DCE). With DCE, Databricks provides users with access to a a 6GB micro-cluster and Spark notebook environment to try out Spark and to prototype applications.
Sean Michael Kerner is a senior editor at EnterpriseAppsToday and InternetNews.com. Follow him on Twitter @TechJournalist
Sean Michael is a writer who focuses on innovation and how science and technology intersect with industry, technology Wordpress, VMware Salesforce, And Application tech. TechCrunch Europas shortlisted her for the best tech journalist award. She enjoys finding stories that open people's eyes. She graduated from the University of California.
